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Hitting A Snag

We had a spot of “babysitting” yesterday, as the niece came to visit for the afternoon while her parents are in Venice and the grandparents were at some sort of social function.

Whenever she comes round, we inevitably end up playing on the Xbox. It amuses me no end that I have all these powerful games consoles kicking about, with plenty of fantastical worlds to be experienced and she just wants to play one of the Lego Marvel games and let Iron Man drive a bus around Manhattan.

For hours.

Yesterday though, alongside the bus driver fantasies and general shenanigans she started playing hide-and-seek in game with Carole. I mean, it’s hide-and-seek in the loosest sense of the word because a) you can see exactly where the other person is on screen anyway and b) there’s a bloody great radar, face icon and arrow that point them out. But still, hours were spent doing that. Probably more is usually spent in her Lego-based public transport simulator. We’ve probably created a monster.

While all this was going on, I was put in charge of making our evening meal.

It was a simple affair, just beans and sausages. And some bread – homemade, natch – to soak up all the lovely orange bean juices.

How many sausages do we want? A simple question. I got sausages in packs of 8. Everyone wanted three. Which is nice sausages. Which is annoying. But doable, because I have accommodated for this very occasion.

It is decided that I shall just cook all the sausages because who doesn’t like a cold sausage sandwich the following day. Or, in this case, the following following day. And possibly beyond that.

Because I dutifully cooked all these sausages. Sixteen of the little blighters, and then Carole and our long-legged house guest pop into the kitchen and decide that, actually, the sausages are much larger than they imagined they would be. So could they only have two.

Two.

Which would mean, between us, we only needed seven sausages. A packet of eight would have done us just fine. But no, these two ne’er-do-wells have me trying to get sixteen sausages arranged in a roasting tin, which was not the easiest bit of meat-based tessellation I have ever done, I can tell you.

And then, to rub it in, as I stood in the kitchen and muttered, they just buggered off back to put the Xbox through the taxing task of more hide-and-seek.

I think it’s behaviour like that that made Gordon Ramsey the swearing person he is today. I can feel his pain.